Boston buyout shop acquires Greenwich car-wash chain

By Alexander Soule

Updated
12:47 pm CST, Tuesday, November 6, 2018

Splash Car Wash has been sold to a Boston private equity investment firm, more than 35 years after a pair of entrepreneurs created the company with the 1981 purchase of Greenwich Car Wash. Photo by Brad Horrigan / New Haven Register

Splash Car Wash has been sold to a Boston private equity investment firm, more than 35 years after a pair of entrepreneurs created the company with the 1981 purchase of Greenwich Car Wash. Photo by Brad

Splash Car Wash has been sold to a Boston private equity investment firm, more than 35 years after a pair of entrepreneurs created the company with the 1981 purchase of Greenwich Car Wash. Photo by Brad Horrigan / New Haven Register

Splash Car Wash has been sold to a Boston private equity investment firm, more than 35 years after a pair of entrepreneurs created the company with the 1981 purchase of Greenwich Car Wash. Photo by Brad

Splash Car Wash has been sold to a Boston private equity investment firm, more than 35 years after a pair of entrepreneurs created the company with the 1981 purchase of Greenwich Car Wash.

Splash remains based in Greenwich under CEO Mark Curtis and co-founder Chris Fisher alongside partner Dan Petrelle, with the company operating 15 car wash and oil lube facilities in Connecticut and another three in New York.

Palladin Consumer Retail Partners did not state what it paid for Splash, with the Boston firm in its 20th year of investing in businesses that have between $5 million and $20 million in adjusted earnings annually.

Palladin’s current investment portfolio includes Nic+Zoe, an apparel store that opened in the past year a store in the new Bedford Square complex in downtown Westport; with past investments having included J.McLaughlin, Restoration Hardware and Things Remembered.

At Splash, prices range from $4 for a self-serve wash lasting five minutes; to unlimited, full-service details at varied pricing depending on location, including $60 a month in Greenwich and lesser amounts for additional household vehicles.

In addition to Greenwich car washes on East Putnam and West Putnam avenues, Splash has southwestern Connecticut locations in Stamford, Bridgeport, Norwalk, New Haven, Darien, Fairfield, Shelton and Wilton.

Last week, the trade publication Professional Carwashing & Detailing ranked Splash among the 20 largest chains in country, with Tucson, Ariz.-based Mister Car Wash at the head of the line with 264 locations at the time of publication. The largest operator in the world changed hands a year ago, after the United Kingdom-based International Car Wash Group was acquired by Atlanta-based Roark Capital.

Among Connecticut-based car wash chains, Splash was topped only by Norwalk-based Russell Speeder’s Car Wash, which operates 23 locations in seven states. It remains largely a fragmented industry, with the International Carwash Association counting some 28,500 tunnel car washes in the United States, but only a dozen having more than 28 locations.

Speaking in Hartford in 2016 in opposition to a sales tax on car washes implemented the prior year, Curtis told members of the Connecticut General Assembly that Splash’s operating costs had increased 15 percent over the preceding few years, with the company not passing on all of those extra costs to its customers.